Metadata management in an interdisciplinary, project-specific data repository: A case study from earth sciences

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to manage metadata of (research) data from the interdisciplinary, long-term, DFG-funded, collaborative research project ‘Patterns in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Systems: Monitoring, Modelling, and Data Assimilation’. In this framework, a data repository, the so-called TR32DB project database, was established in 2008 with the aim to manage the resulting data of the involved scientists. The data documentation with accurate, extensive metadata has been a key task. Consequently, a standardized, interoperable, multi-level metadata schema has been designed and implemented to ensure a proper documentation and publication of all project data (e.g. data, publication, reports), as well as to facilitate data search, exchange and re-use. A user-friendly web-interface was designed for a simple metadata input and search.